Last home in Bremerton's Westpark neighborhood now gone

The last house in the former Westpark neighborhood was demolished Tuesday.
(LARRY STEAGALL/KITSAP SUN)

The final Westpark house was demolished Tuesday.
(LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN)

BREMERTON - The excavator's mouth chewed at the roof of the last remaining house at Westpark on Tuesday morning.

One wall succumbed in the roar, then another. Was that worn lavender wall a little girl's room? That green — certainly a bathroom.

The mouth grabbed at a flimsy bathtub, turning it and tossing it aside.

Graves from the next hill at Miller-Woodlawn Memorial Park gazed on as a cold April sun illuminated the final act of Westpark.

How many lives had played out since this duplex and the surrounding neighborhood were built 70 years ago for wartime overflow? How much love expressed? Pain? Could this birthplace of generations of Kitsap families really be gone?

A truck trailer with stained canvas sides waited like the undertaker for the house's remains.

The neighborhood had gone up in just nine rushed months starting in 1940 to house shipyard families. Temporary housing, they called it. Seventy years temporary.

What once were large, towering Douglas fir trees — symbols for this neighborhood that became low-income housing after the war — were mere piles of stripped and sawed trunks this morning.

"It really doesn't take long," said Mike Moore of Hos Bros. Construction, Inc., overseer of the demolition of Westpark, as he paused to mark the moment. He was the only one here on Baer Boulevard with the ghosts of children playing, of the smell of barbecues, of old people chatting on lawns that had no fences.

Some 571 tattered dwelling have been removed since April 2009, when demolition began. It went in fits and starts, depending on the flow of money. The total cost was $3.8 million, according to the Bremerton Housing Authority, which owns the neighborhood.

"Deconstruction" was attempted early on, with scraps from the houses sorted and recycled. Nearly 1,546 tons of wood was recycled. But the cost and time involved eventually became too much, and went to the wayside.

Bay Vista will replace Westpark. The vision is for a mix of low-income housing and market-rate housing, anchored by a retail village at Kitsap Way and Highway 3.

Certainly the grant-driven affordable housing will come. The Summit, a complex with 83 units, is nearing completion. And construction is underway on Bay Vista West, 68 low-income town houses on Oyster Bay Avenue.

But the recession has greatly slowed the rest. No market-rate house builder has announced plans for Bay Vista, nor has any commercial group, raising the prospect that Bay Vista could be a expanse of space with some low-income housing for some time.

This morning, weeds popped up from the cracks of the sidewalks among Baer Boulevard, but the sidewalks were empty.